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      Streams of Consciousness Streams of Consciousness
      Hip-Deep Dispatches from the River of Life
      by Jeff Hull
      The Lyons Press, 2007.

      In this collection of 16 essays, former fishing guide Jeff Hull writes about fishing, both literally and as a metaphor for life. Does he fish for material to write about, or does he write to support his fishing? The two are inextricably intertwined like a badly tangled line.
       
      Hull baits his prose with apt descriptions of the angler's temper:  "The trout flicks away at the last second, but swirls beneath the fly, still looking up, its flanks lucid flashes of light in the spring water. 'Take it!' I hear in my head. 'Take it, take it, take it!'"   

      		On our creek, there is no better time to fish than what remains of the day after the sun has set and the direct light is lost, when birds of prey lose the luminosity of their height advantage. Caddis pop like popcorn on the surface and small mayflies float mote-like in the air.
      The hooks, though, are in the places Hull goes casting (Belize, Patagonia, Montana, Tuamotus, Kansas) and they work their way into the soft palate of the soul when he reveals barbs of racism and recalls his brother's slow death and his own suicidal depression.
      These are unexpected depths and rougher waters than one usually finds in fishing literature, but there lies the promise of the biggest fish. As a doctor at the Menninger psychiatric hospital in Kansas told Hull while he was a patient there, "by needing to see things a certain way to survive, we deny other things."
      		 

      If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lesson you have already decided to learn.
      -- C.S. Lewis.



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